The last week of April marked the fifth annual Youth Victory Over Violence Week in Milwaukee. The week focused on violence prevention, mental health and youth empowerment. Nyriah Bailey was one of the students who organized the workshops, a town hall and a peace march. She talked to WUWM’s Race & Ethnicity Reporter Teran Powell about the challenges youth face, how adults could better understand what young people need and why it was important for her to help plan and participate in the week's events.
Nyriah Bailey: I feel like for me it irritates me because I can't even go get ice cream without us having this label of being violent and us like just messing up everything. So I was like, if I want to see change, I have to be the change. I just want every young person to know that we're we're capable of changing. We don't have to be what society has put on us.
Teran Powell: Tell me more about why it's significant in Milwaukee.
Because one, we have been influenced by each other. A lot of times when you think of violence, violence can sometimes start at home. So it's like while everybody is bashing the teens or the young people, you don't know what kids go through. Each kid has a different story. You don't know what they go home to, what they have seen. So I just feel like it became such a thing in Milwaukee because the teenagers have shown themselves as something that they're really not because of things that they have been through — if that makes sense.
It definitely does. When it comes to young people and interaction with the adults around them, community around them, leaders, like, when we're trying to find the solution to creating access for young people and resources and keeping them off the streets or from bad activities, like what do you think is missing from that conversation that we're not having?
Sometimes older people believe that that they sit on...a higher pedestal than young people. What happens is when you grow up and you see things that you're not used to seeing, it sometimes damages kids' brain. I'm speaking for myself, I just remember that as a young kid I always knew how to articulate my words. I always knew how I felt. I didn't mind telling people how I felt. But because people— older people — were so raised in the 'Oh I was raised this way, and if I said no is no.' But this new generation has came with a voice.
What y'all like to say is talk back, but it's really not talking back. It's 'I want you to hear me. I want you to hear what I have to say.' So that's why I feel like a lot of times it's a disconnect with adults and kids because kids just want you to hear them. They just want you to understand like I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be this thing that you say I am, but I want you to hear me. And adults just have this mindset of 'I'm not changing my rules for no kid. When I was a kid I didn’t do this.' But it’s a new generation and you don’t know what’s instilled in these kids.
Every kid (is) different. You can't treat all these kids the same. You can't always go back to what you feel like when you was raised. This is how it should be now because in the society where you was raised, you can go to the park and not get shot. You can't do that here. So it's it's different.
So you can't just always be like, 'Oh, well, I'm adult so you're going to respect a adult,' 'cuz I believe that sometimes kids can pour into to adults, so you just have to hear kids out sometimes, see where we coming from.
From your perspective what would be the setting where young people would feel welcome and comfortable to take advantage?
We need more resources. And what I mean by resources is, yeah, while we have the community, you know, giving us these things, these nice things, but it's just like how do we — a lot of kids they don't drive, how do we get there?
This is how I look at it as a young person. I go out, I go into the world, it's all these bars and liquors and downtown, you go downtown, the scooter things has become adult things because you are, you know, y'all drink.
So it's like everything that was or that we felt like was for us, it wasn't for us because if you look around what really is for us because we're in this age where Sky Zone is for 2-5 year olds and then it's like uh Kids Empire is, you know, it's nothing really for teenagers to do that's actually like this is enjoyment because we've been — Milwaukee is a small town — we've been here for so long, so Sky Zone become boring, Kids Empire become boring. It's like what else can we do? And I feel like that's why kids be trying to figure out what to do and they do it in the wrong way. And we don't have nobody help.
